South Africa’s getting the ‘slower’ Samsung Galaxy S10 variant, benchmarks suggest

If you couldn’t care less about benchmarks and actually use your smartphone as a phone, this news probably won’t apply to you.

But if you care about floating points, PCMark scores, and raw performance numbers, you may want to take a seat. Even more so if you’re planning to purchase a Samsung Galaxy S10 or S10 Plus.

According to benchmarks performed by Anandtech, the Exynos 9820 version of the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus — the version of the phone South Africa will receive — is notably slower than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855-powered devices offering in the likes of the US.

The 855 will also power the likes of the Sony Xperia 1, LG V50 ThinQ 5G, and Xiaomi Mi 9.

Running popular benchmarking apps PCMark and Speedometer, the publication noted that the Snapdragon 855 chipset is faster than the Exynos 9820 in all measured parameters. These include web browsing, video editing, data writing, photo editing, and data manipulation.

This is something we’ve been before between the previous generation Exynos and Snapdragon, the 9810 and 845, respectively.

But even more telling is Samsung’s rival’s performance. Notably, the Exynos 9820 also lags behind the Huawei Mate 20 Pro’s Kirin 980 chipset (and in some instances, the Honor View 20) in every benchmark too, bar video editing.

While Anandtech does note that the gap between this generation of chips compared to the previous is much smaller, you won’t really notice the difference in day-to-day usage anyway.

Still, if you have a thing for charts, do peruse Anandtech’s extensive look at the difference between the two chipsets here.

Feature image: Samsung